Book Review: Wild Capital- Discovering Nature in Delhi by Neha Sinha

I am writing this review sitting on my balcony, surrounded by trees, with rain falling as I type. The smell of wet earth is rising from somewhere below, and the trees are doing that thing they do in Delhi rain where they seem to exhale, visibly, with relief. It is the kind of moment that stops you mid-sentence. And it strikes me, sitting here with Neha Sinha's book in my hands, that this is exactly the kind of moment she has been writing about all along, and that I have sat in this same balcony through dozens of Delhi monsoons without ever truly paying attention to what was happening right in front of me.

I have lived in Delhi for over four decades. I have driven down the Outer Ring Road more times than I can count, walked through Lodhi Garden on winter mornings, argued with auto drivers in Nizamuddin, eaten chhole bhature in Chandni Chowk, and watched the Yamuna from bridges while stuck in traffic, willing the signal to turn green. I know this city the way you know a person you have lived with for a very long time: its moods, its rhythms, its noise, its smell after the first rain of June. I thought I knew Delhi.

Neha Sinha has spent years looking at the same city I have lived in for four decades, and what she has seen in it I had never once noticed. Because it was there....it was always there. The greater flamingos taking their long, elegant strides across the salt flats of Najafgarh. The fireflies lighting up dark corners of groves that have stood since before this city was called Delhi. The Pilkhan trees along Outer Ring Road, the very road I have driven down a thousand times, quietly turn a delicate shade of red each spring as new leaves push through. Centuries-old groves standing in the middle of a metropolis of thirty million people, patient and unnoticed. A river that was once alive. Birds calling in languages most of us have never learned to hear.

Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi is Neha Sinha's account of what happens when someone who has been trained to look actually looks, and the experience of reading it as someone who has spent forty years in this city without ever truly seeing it is something that sits between wonder and a quiet, gentle shame. Not the shame of having done something wrong but the shame of having missed something extraordinary that was offered to you every single day and that you never once received.

Sinha, a conservation biologist trained at Oxford and in literature at St. Stephen's College, uniquely combines scientific rigor with lyrical expression in this book. She does not write like a textbook, and she does not write like a tourist. She writes with a deep love for the natural world and has the skill to inspire that love in you, even if you've spent a lifetime overlooking it.

The book moves through Delhi the way a good conversation moves: unhurried, associative, full of digressions that are actually the point. She traces ecological histories alongside personal memories, finds mammal tracks alongside stories of extraordinary human lives, and discovers in the neglected and the overlooked a richness that the celebrated and the preserved cannot match. The Yamuna, which most Delhiites experience as a brown, sorry reminder of what we have done to our rivers, is in Sinha's hands something far more complex and far more heartbreaking precisely because she shows you what it was and what it still, stubbornly, tries to be.

What this book does, more than anything else, is give you a new set of eyes for a place you thought you already knew. And that is a genuinely rare thing for any book to do. Most books take you somewhere you have never been. This one takes you somewhere you have always been and shows you that you have never really arrived.

I kept thinking, as I read it, about all the mornings I drove past Lodhi Garden without stopping, all the evenings I spent inside when the light outside was doing something extraordinary, all the times I looked at the sky above this city and saw only haze when somewhere above that haze there were birds I did not know the names of, living lives I had never imagined. Neha Sinha knows their names. She knows their lives. And in the generous, luminous way that only the best writers manage, she shares that knowledge while ensuring you feel informed, even though you didn't have it before.

Wild Capital explores attention, revealing the profound beauty of the natural world that surrounds us daily, even in unexpected places. This book will quietly and permanently change how you move through Delhi, whether you love it, have complicated feelings about it, or have lived there and sometimes feel exhausted by it or grateful for it.

And if you happen to be sitting in a balcony surrounded by trees while it rains outside, put the phone down for a moment. Look at the trees...listen to the rain......as Neha Sinha would want you to.

And to Neha Sinha, thank you for teaching me to see the city I have called home for over four decades, as if for the very first time. I will carry this perspective for the rest of my life. Hugs.... 

Title: Wild Capital—Discovering Nature in Delhi by Neha Sinha. 

Published by: HarperCollins India. 

Available on Amazon, Flipkart, and at harpercollins.co.in.

(Reviewed by Shweta for Style Essentials)